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Seems odd to me that unlike most equipment helmets only need to pass a minimum standard and are not routinely assessed for performance against each other. If the information was there would users, for example, choose a slightly heavier helmet if it was proven to give better protection?
Anyway some testing has been done. Only a few helmets available in the UK market were recommended.
Virgina Tech has been doing similar for a while (the summary above seems to describe similar testing)
https://www.helmet.beam.vt.edu/bicycle-helmet-ratings.html
Virginia Tech site's been my go-to for years now. Coupled with finding a helmet that fits best also. Not tested them myself in anger thankfully.
It's complicated, since there's a lack of concensus about what really makes a perfect helmet, and as soon as that happens you inevitably get situations where people make the best helmet they can but it doesn't satisy a particular standard for Reasons, or where they make a less good helmet in order to play the tests. And making a totally repeatable lab test that accurately reflects real world performance would still be hard even if everyone agreed on exactly what's important.
Like, the astm downhill test which in the end seems to have fizzled out, had some really weird stuff like a helmet could fail if it had a chinpiece that didn't meet the standard, but a helmet with no chinpiece at all and everything else the same would pass. It also had the classic issue of really specific impact sites so that if you had a vent or similar where they did the test, you were pretty much guaranteed to fail, whereas if it were 2cm to the left you could have passed. These things were all done for good reasons but they basically institutionalised issues.
'twas ever thus, motorcycling has always had the broadly competing and fairly incompatible CE and SNELL tests where CE has always stressed softness for reducing brain injury from deceleration and dwell times, and SNELL has always stressed hardness for penetration resistance, and then along came SHARP which was a good concept but delivered poorly so that it, frinstance, impact tested areas of the helmet that the real world evidence showed were unlikely to get hit.
Has to be the most important thing to have lab tests for.
Next, waterproof breathable garments, and insulated ones. Too much marketing bullshit and unevidenced performance claims.
I recognise some popular models:
Bell Super Air R MIPS - 19% better than the average helment
Fox Speedframe Pro ELV - 18% better
POC TECTAL SPIN - 13% worse
Makes sense to see MTB helmets coming out on top.
Website here with the 2020 results and a similar report on kids helmets: https://www.roadsafetytrust.org.uk/cycle-helmets-project/cycle-helmet-testing-reports